Well, howdy, Pastor Mark Driscoll here? Apparently to my Catholic friends, my hos found your

bees nest recently. So I thought I would follow up and let you know. Here's what I think about

Catholics and Catholicism. This may surprise you. So I grew up Irish Catholic, O'Driscoll, and actually

was, I think I was born in a Catholic hospital.

I was baptized as a baby or given a, maybe a, I don't know, a bath in a Catholic church as a baby.

And then I went to Catholic school for a while, and I was an altar boy and assisted the priest with

Mass.

I also was the kid that on Christmas Eve was often chosen to read the reading that year from the lectern.

So I'm pretty familiar with Catholicism.

When I became a Christian in college, because I was a Catholic, but I was not a Christian.

Now, there are Catholics that are Christian. They do know and love Jesus. There are many of them.

My mom was one of them. I, however, was in the church, but nobody really ever told me a lot about Jesus.

There was a lot of tradition. There was a lot of rules and rituals. And there was a lot of stand up, sit down, kneel, and go through all of the motions, none of which is evil or bad. But quite frankly, there was very little Bible teaching. And the tradition really sort of muddled the ability to clearly see Christ.

I didn't have a bad experience in the Catholic Church.

Nothing bad ever happened to me.

I have no axe to grind or beef.

And then once I became a Christian, God spoke to me and said,

Mary Grace, preached the Bible, trained men, and plant churches.

Those are the four things that God audibly spoke to me as a 19-year-old man after meeting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

The family, my family, had a bit of angst about this because we were very devout Catholic,

and my grandmother was a nun. So my grandfather died. My grandmother spent

so much time in the few Catholic churches in her small hometown that she actually had keys to

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